My user page needs an update

19:51, 12 June 2010 (UTC): after a long hiatus, I have a Garmin Edge 205 GPS receiver and some track files to upload. I need to update my older notes below. This page won't necessarily make sense for a while.

My mapping interests

I am primarily interested in mapping bicycle routes and locations accessible by bicycle, within about a 100 km radius of my location (the extent of my typical day-riding range; all my rides begin and end at my house). This includes bicycle paths, state parks, and much of the secondary road network.

GPS buddies. Several people I bicycle with have GPS receivers, but only a few are sharing their track files yet. I'm encouraging them to upload their tracks here. At least one was amazed that here we can upload our tracks, and then other people can edit them into maps.

Get my own GPS and start recording my bicycle rides. I ride about 8000 miles/13000 km per year, with a fair amount of route variety as I like to ride to group rides that meet some distance from where I live, and then proceed in various directions further out. Actually I ride over a bewildering variety of back roads around Cincinnati. As bicyclists like to avoid motor traffic insofar as possible, we constantly seek out the most obscure roads that tend to be poorly mapped by commercial vendors, TIGER, and so on. USGS maps tend to be pretty solid, but they don't show every road name.

OKI Bicycle Route Maps

I have, use, and contribute to the OKI Bicycle Route Maps which cover bicycle routes in my area. The maps were originally only available in printed form, but after some lobbying from yours truly and others, OKI put them online for us as PDF files. At my request, they also exported part of their route data to a KML file which you can download here. I'm not sure whether I can legally extract data from it and publish to OSM, but I will check into that (in the United States, most of our government-generated information seems to be free from copyright, but the situation is not always clear when private contractors were involved). If not, we have enough local bicyclists plying all the roads and trails on the route guides to collect the same data via GPS, once we have enough GPS-equipped bicyclists participating. And that's the right way to do things anyway according to the OSM FAQ. Teratornis 02:21, 18 Jul 2006 (BST)

TIGER import

United States National Bicycle Network

Start and help organize a WikiProject similar to the United Kingdom National Cycle Network, for the United States. I guess that would be a United States National Bicycle Network. In the United States we usually (but not always) say bicycle instead of cycle, although we say both cycling and bicycling to refer to the non-motorized activity (I'm not saying the inconsistency makes sense). I should probably stick to the customary United States usage bicycle for the United States project, to avoid confusing my fellow Americans, although I have no personal preference. Bicyclists in the U.S. have borrowed some British English bicycle terms, such as block, kit, and knackered, although our use of the word bonk is decidedly different, from what I gather. I don't suppose it would pain us to borrow cycle more consistently as well. Teratornis 02:08, 18 Jul 2006 (BST)

To-do

To-do: describe more things I'd like to do.

User pages

I'm editing the following user pages for review by others, and possible later addition to the OSM documentation Wiki somewhere:

User:Teratornis/WindowsUsers (start date: 12:59, 5 Jul 2006): a page that inventories the various Unix/Linux/GNU tool command-line examples on OSM Wiki and Talk pages, and describes ways for Windows users to run them. Ultimately this page can be a compact link target to include with the various examples, to avoid repetitive in-line advice for Windows users.

User:Teratornis/BicycleRouteMappingProjects (start date: 17:38, 13 Jul 2006 (BST)): a page with links to all the bicycle route mapping projects I am aware of. The goals and methods of some of these projects may be compatible with OpenStreetMap.